We’ve entered the dirty socks part of March, the dingy linen stained grunge metal time when winter’s rough hide pokes up in earth’s skin. It’s the shoulder season – not white shoulder, not tanned shoulder – the prickly wan unexercised but already slapped into a strapless dress season.
You can see it in the raw mud and thawing wood planks, the expanding pot holes. The cheeks and legs of twiggy yards are in bad need of a shave. They have been caught off-guard – they are still thinking winter, and no one told them it is time to emerge!
In a way, it’s fabulous…there is physics of sorts in the works. A physicist on the radio explained that not every part of an organism gets news of change at the same time. There’s an information delay. The head of a slinky knows it is falling and begins to collapse after a hand has released it. But the lower rings defy gravity, hovering and remaining in suspension for a fraction of a second.
So the information delay about spring…my plants, in the final stretch of indoor captivity, seem to be giving up, dropping their leaves, and one after another, my fingernails are breaking. Yes, daylight lasts much longer. But they haven’t gotten the memo yet!